TODAY IN HISTORY

1860: Republican Abraham Lincoln, a former Illinois congressman, was elected president of the United States as he defeated John Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen Douglas.

1893: Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky died in St.

Petersburg, Russia, at age 53.

1906: Republican Charles Evans Hughes was elected governor of New York, defeating newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.

1928: In a first, the results of Republican Herbert Hoover’s presidential election victory over Democrat Alfred E. Smith were flashed onto an electric wraparound sign on the New York Times building. 1956: President Dwight D. Eisenhower won reelection, defeating Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson. 1977: Thirty-nine people were killed when the Kelly Barnes Dam in Georgia burst, sending a wall of water through Toccoa Falls College.

1984: President Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide over former Vice President Walter Mondale, the Democratic challenger.

1990: About one-fifth of the Universal Studios backlot in Southern California was destroyed in an arson fire.

2012: President Barack Obama was elected to a second term of office, defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

2014: The march toward same-sex marriage across the U.S. hit a roadblock when a federal appeals court upheld laws against the practice in four states: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. (A divided U.S. Supreme Court overturned the laws in June 2015.)

2015: President Barack Obama rejected the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, declaring it would undercut U.S. efforts to clinch a global climate change deal at the center of his environmental legacy. (President Donald Trump would reverse the Obama decision, but President Joe Biden canceled the permit for the pipeline on the day he took office.)

2016: FBI Director James Comey abruptly announced that Democrat Hillary Clinton should not face criminal charges related to newly discovered emails from her tenure at the State Department. 2017: Former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner reported to prison in Massachusetts to begin a 21-month sentence for sexting with a 15-year-old girl.